“If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence,” Francis said. “And no, not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there’s everything.”

In his response, Pope Francis seemed to suggest that jihadists killing innocent people in the name of Allah is not significantly different from a Catholic who kills his girlfriend or mother-in-law, presumably for motives unrelated to the Christian religion.

Francis acknowledged that there are “violent persons of this religion [Islam],” immediately adding that “in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists. We have them.”

The Pope asserted moreover that he knows how Muslims think, and that deep down they desire peace and harmony just as Christians do.

“I had a long conversation with the imam, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar University, and I know how they think,” he said. “They seek peace, encounter.”

“I do not believe it is right to identify Islam with violence. This is not right or true,” he said.

The Pope insisted that the Islamic State does not draw its ideology from the religion of Islam, but appeals rather to the emptiness of young people and a love for violence.

“How many young people, how many young people of our Europe, whom we have left empty of ideals, who do not have work… they take drugs, alcohol, or go there to enlist in fundamentalist groups,” he said. “One can say that the so-called ISIS, but it is an Islamic State which presents itself as violent . . . because when they show us their identity cards, they show us how on the Libyan coast they slit the Egyptians’ throats or other things.”

“But this is a fundamentalist group which is called ISIS… but you cannot say, I do not believe, that it is true or right that Islam is terrorist,” he said.

The Pope concluded by suggesting that Islamic terrorism does not stem from any violence inherent to Islam itself, but rather from other non-religious motives, such as poverty.

“Terrorism grows when there are no other options, and when the center of the global economy is the god of money and not the person,” Francis said. “You have cast out the wonder of creation — man and woman — and you have put money in its place. This is a basic terrorism against all of humanity! Think about it!” he said.

First, there is no significant leadership in the modern Christian world – either religious or civil leadership – openly arguing for violence in the name of Christian doctrine, or providing it with a veneer of legitimacy. The leadership of the major denominations, from top to bottom, are foursquare against violence to enforce Christian morals, and the New Testament is notably short on violent punishments. “Yes,” I hear you say, “but Muslim leaders condemn violence too!” This is a debatable point in the specific case of violence against gays, as Andrew McCarthy has detailed, but even if you treat Islam-in-general as indistinguishable from Christianity-in-general in this regard, you still have to deal with radical Islam. Radical Islam is a significant, large-scale political movement around the world that is very much openly, proudly in favor of violence in service of the dictates of radical readings of Islamic law.

The radicals are not a small, isolated, fringe movement. They control territory, ISIS being the most extreme example, as well as Al Qaeda during its residencies in Afghanistan and Sudan. They have tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of volunteers, and larger numbers of sympathizers, such as the many people in Muslim countries who tell pollsters they support the death penalty for leaving Islam. (ThinkProgress touted a Pew study a few years ago finding that 57% of the population of 11 Muslim countries had a negative view of Al Qaeda - which means the people who didn’t have a negative view of Al Qaeda are a minority of the general population comparable to supporters of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in the United States.) They have varying degrees influence in any number of governments (e.g., Iran, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) – the ten countries where homosexuality is punishable by death are all Islamic, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. They are well-financed, including by wealthy donors and the Saudi government and religious establishments. They have major support from radical pulpits and extensive networks on the web, connections to which turn up regularly in “lone wolf” cases. It is true that most any belief system or creed, religious or secular, inspires some crackpots who turn it to violence. There are some radical Christians. But it is not realistic to suggest that Christianity, or most other religious or political causes around the world, has an active global movement of this prominence, influence, resources and infrastructure that endorses the use of violence for the cause.

Second, drawing these parallels completely ignores the scale of the problem. The State Department issues an annual report on terrorism around the globe, and the carnage is enormous: over the past ten years (2006-2015), the State Department reports 115,023 terrorist attacks, resulting in 190,008 people killed, 329,782 injured, 73,758 kidnapped or taken hostage. The pace is escalating: the past two years (even with State’s annual caveat of “conservative estimates of terrorism in Syria”) have seen an average of 12,619 attacks per year, 30,528 killed a year, 35,056 wounded and 10,809 kidnapped or taken hostage. And the attacks are heavily concentrated in nations with active radical Islamic movements (albeit, in a few cases, with counter-movements that commit their own atrocities).

This — all of this — is not just stupid, it’s offensive. Or rather, it’s offensive because it’s so stupid, and does nothing but sow confusion.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the bit from Crux. The parallel between baptized Italian Catholics who kill family members and Muslim terrorists who slaughter Christians and others (including other Muslims they deem heretics) in the name of Allah is crazy. Guess what, Francis? All across the Islamic world, Muslim men steal, they beat their wives, they cheat their neighbor, and so on, not because Islam tells them to, but because they are human beings. Same in Christian countries, and in every society on earth. At issue is Muslim slaughtering priests at the altar, turning non-Muslim girls into sex slaves, blowing up churches, and carrying out all manner of barbaric evil explicitly and unapologetically in the name of their religion. You can call it a twisted interpretation of Islam, or condemn it for other reasons. In the cases of the baptized Catholic who kills his mother-in-law, or the believing Muslim who does the same, in neither instance is their religion a motivating factor in the crime. It is incidental to their violent acts. The terrorism that ISIS and its supporters carry out is done openly in the name of Islam, motivated by their interpretation of the religion.

I can’t decide whether it’s more disturbing if the Pope really cannot see the fallacy here, or if he is just saying what he figures is diplomatically correct.

Second, this idea of Francis’s that economics, not religion, is behind Islamic terrorism, is materialist claptrap that one would think a Pope is beyond falling for. The world is full of desperately poor people who do not slaughter priests. The world is also full of desperately poor Muslim people who do not slaughter priests, shoot up nightclubs, mow down people with trucks, and so forth. In fact, poverty is not much of a factor at all in who becomes radicalized by Salafi Islam.

The Pope is once again ignoring a simple distinction: while people of all faiths and backgrounds commit acts of violence, Islam is unique among world religions in having a developed doctrine, theology and legal system mandating warfare against unbelievers. Unless and until that is confronted, Muslims will continue to commit acts of violence against non-Muslims, including Christians. The Pope is betraying the Christians of the Middle East and the world, and all the victims of jihad violence, by repeating palpable falsehoods about the motivating ideology of attacks upon them, instead of confronting that ideology and calling upon Muslims to renounce and reform Islam’s doctrines of violence.

“The pope said that when he reads the newspaper, he reads about an Italian who kills his fiancé or his mother in law. ‘They are baptized Catholics. They are violent Catholics.’” Does Catholicism teach the murder of fiancés or mothers in law? No. Does Islam teach jihad warfare against unbelievers? Yes.

“The pope said that in every religion there are violent people, ‘a small group of fundamentalists,’ including in Catholicism.” There have been 28,923 violent jihad terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. How many violent attacks have there been in that span by violent Catholic “fundamentalists” doing violence in the name of Catholicism?

In the most recent issue of Dabiq, the propaganda magazine of the Islamic State, ISIS criticizes Pope Francis for his naïveté in clinging to the conviction that Muslims want peace and that acts of Islamic terror are economically motivated.

“This is a divinely-warranted war between the Muslim nation and the nations of disbelief,” the authors state in an article titled “By the Sword.”

The Islamic State directly attacks Francis for claiming that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence,” saying that by doing this, “Francis continues to hide behind a deceptive veil of ‘good will,’ covering his actual intentions of pacifying the Muslim nation.”

Pope Francis “has struggled against reality” in his efforts to portray Islam as a religion of peace, the article insists, before going on to urge all Muslims to take up the sword of jihad, the “greatest obligation” of a true Muslim.

Despite the obviously religious nature of their attacks, the article states, “many people in Crusader countries express shock and even disgust that Islamic State leadership ‘uses religion to justify violence.’”

“Indeed, waging jihad – spreading the rule of Allah by the sword – is an obligation found in the Quran, the word of our Lord,” it reads.

“The blood of the disbelievers is obligatory to spill by default. The command is clear. Kill the disbelievers, as Allah said, ‘Then kill the polytheists wherever you find them.’”

The Islamic State also reacted to Pope Francis’s description of recent acts of Islamic terror as “senseless violence,” insisting that there is nothing senseless about it.

“The gist of the matter is that there is indeed a rhyme to our terrorism, warfare, ruthlessness, and brutality,” they declare, adding that their hatred for the Christian West is absolute and implacable.